Hard Drive Partitions [Archive]

skibum0417

06-21-2000, 02:14 PM

I am going to purchase a new computer with a 30 gb hard drive. One of my friends told me i should partition it putting the operating system on its own drive to make it run faster. Someone else told me that the partition would just take up more memory. Can anyone clear this up for me?

krusty the klown

06-22-2000, 12:14 AM

Well, you can just partition it as 1 drive, but that would be inefficient, as the cluster sizes would be large, so small files take up 1 cluster, which is more than the file size.

I have a 20GB drive as one partition (I know I'm not practising what I preach here, but...). If I use a util like SiSoft Sandra, it tells me that the cluster size is 16k, so if I have a 1k file there, it takes up the whole cluster = 15k wasted.

I believe the optimum partition size for a FAT 32 drive is 7GB. A 7GB partition will have 4k clusters and so will any partition smaller than that. Over 7G, the cluster size starts to increase.

A tip: if you create a small partition on the drive of ~ 500MB, force windoze to use this drive for the swap file. Also, do not let it manage the swap file itself, instead, manually set the size so that the minimum size is the same as the maximum. If you let win sort the swap file out, it can get fragmented, especially if you are creating and deleting a lot of files on the same drive as the swap file (e.g. if you have a CD burner).

I personally can't think of a particular advantage of putting win on 1 partition, program files on the other, and data on a third apart from neatness. It will be easier to organise your files this way, cos you won't end up with a file list as long as your arm in the root directory!